Ready to be Strong
by etienneofthewestwind
Summary: It's not just the question. It's also timing and context. Spoilers for Arrow season one.


**Ready to be Strong  
by ****é****tienneofthewestwind**

**Summary: **It's not just the question. It's also timing and context. Spoiler for Arrow season one.  
**Disclaimer: **Don't own Buffy. Don't own Arrow or any of the various DC elements the series AUs.  
**Note: **This in an AU of an AU crossover I've been trying to plot out for a while. As it turns out, double AUs can be cannon-compliant.

* * *

_Are you ready to be strong?_

Mirthless laughter erupted as fourteen year-old Thea Queen dropped her pen onto her notebook and glanced around her room. Thea might have dreamed about being strong and making her own way in the world, but she could not even run away to LA for a mere weekend without scurrying right back. Thea sighed and rubbed her wrist, though the bruises were long faded. The mugger outside that bus depot had driven reality home: Thea was just a stupid, spoiled little girl who had spent her life sheltered behind walls of her family's money. She flitted about unaware of how cruel the world could be until she woke up one morning without a father or brother.

And who now, apparently, heard voices.

Still, she was not going to delude herself. Her only strength lay in her family name.

* * *

Thea's safety was never worth this.

Thea slapped the current sandwich closed and plopped it on the plate in front of her. She grabbed another piece of bread and started spreading peanut butter on it. A woman grabbed it for the four year-old in her arms. The kid silently grabbed the sandwich with both hands. He took an almost mechanical bite as eyes still blood-shot from crying stared at the floor. His lips smacked as he chewed, but otherwise he was quiet.

Too quiet.

All the children were too quiet now. A few had dropped off to sleep from sheer exhaustion, but most just stood or sat. Their silence conveyed stress and fear more than tears and screams had. Thea could not blame them; she had yet to start processing Merlyn's quake, and she was mature enough to understand what had happened around her. Plus, as much as she had come to love parts of the Glades, it was not her home. All Thea had lost was a workplace.

And Thea was still reeling from her mother's press conference.

Thea slapped the sandwich closed and plopped it down. The mother murmured a quiet "thank you" before she walked away, taking a bite out of the sandwich. Thea grabbed the next slice of bread.

_"I don't understand," _Thea had told her mother. It was not entirely true. Thea _could _understand the drive to protect loved ones. She could see it used to coerce people into compliance. But she could not understand how her mother could have lived normally for over five years while advancing a plot to slaughter thousands. How her mother could stand to socialize with the man behind it. A man, who it turned out, had also had killed Thea's father—and presumably her brother at first—for all that time.

How Thea could not have known.

How she could not have even _suspected_ anything, except a non-existent affair between Moira Queen and Malcolm Merlyn.

At least Thea hoped the affair was as non-existent as Ollie had persuaded her. After this morning's front row seat to her mother's public confession, Thea would believe almost anything about her.

Slap. Plop. Next slice.

Thea wanted to believe her mother's words, wanted to believe that Moira Queen _had _realized that the she could not allow the people of the Glades to die. Monsters were supposed to be foreign terrorists who flew planes into buildings or homegrown loners that chopped people up in remote cabins or bombed federal buildings. Not the woman who read you bedtime stories and hosted PTA meetings, all the while helping to build a billion-dollar fortune.

But Thea could not forget what she heard that morning as she passed her mother's room. "Somebody in this family has to put an end this." Ollie had all but stormed out of the room after he said that.

Her brother left the house before Thea could see if he were more forthcoming than her mother. Had Ollie found out about the earthquake device? And if so, had her mother only warned the public to evacuate the Glades because she was afraid that Ollie would do something stupid and get himself killed?

Slap. Plop. Next sli— Thea pulled her hand out of the empty bag, tossed it in the trash, and opened a fresh loaf of bread.

And if Moira Queen was truly a monster, what did that make Thea? She _had _begged Roy not to help those people trapped on the bus, to flee the Glades with her. Thea had been nothing but truthful when she told her mother that she loved Roy. Granted, Thea had started things imagining the look on her mother's face if Thea announced that they had met when Roy stole Thea's purse. But when Thea saw the good in him, she came to love all of Roy.

Even the part that was brainless enough to steal Det. Lance's police radio off his desk in the middle of the police station.

Thea had begged Roy to run, because she cared about him more than anyone else in the Glades. But in the end, she knew she had to let him follow his heart. She had also let him talk her into driving off alone, with his promise to flee as soon as the people on the bus were clear. Sure, she soon picked up a mother and her young children, but if Thea were truly better than her mother, should she not have helped with the bus rescue? Should not the impulse that forced her to rush _into _Glades in the first place have extended to more than rescuing her boyfriend?

Slap. Plop. Next slice.

Whatever Thea was, her life was irrevocably altered. Even if the family could retain some of their fortune after the inevitable fines and lawsuits, even if her mother could somehow avoid a life sentence, the family name was now worse than mud. Thea and Ollie could well spend the rest of their lives judged by the sins of the mother.

Standing in a community center packed with just a small fraction of the Glades refugees, Thea knew that firsthand. She had yet to be recognized, despite her recent tabloid coverage. It was just as well. While making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches—long since turned to just peanut butter sandwiches—for the relief efforts was all she could do at the moment, it was nowhere near what Moira Queen owed them. Thea would rather the people think she did not care about the enormity of her mother's acts, than think she was trivializing the crimes by seeking good publicity for herself.

And while the mobs and riots died down after the quake itself, Thea did not wish to be the epicenter if anger sparked a new one.

Slap. Plop.

Well, whatever happened, Thea would survive it.

She had survived losing her father. She had survived thinking her brother dead for five years, only to slowly realize that the island Ollie had been stranded on had scarred his mind far more than his flesh, and that in many ways the brother she had known _had _died. Thea had survived the car crash and the Vertigo arrest with the subsequent trials and bashes by the press and late-night monologues.

She had survived failure to escape the Glades before the quake hit.

And if she could survive all that, she could survive this. Only this time, Thea would not hide in her old rich brat routine. She would survive because she chose to grasp her inner strength with both hands instead of inadvertently fleeing it. She would survive, not despite herself, but because of herself.

As Thea struggled to get the lid off of the next jar of peanut butter, she felt that she could do so much more, if only she had chosen her strength years ago. What Thea could have accomplished to change this situation or help with it, she had no idea. Only that there was no going back, but that she could—she _would _be a better Thea Queen, with better choices in the future.


End file.
